Come back and visit some more. Thanks for the supportive remarks.

Best Wishes,

-cvj

Sometimes it’s difficult to muster up energy for these battles. But they are well worth the struggle, no matter how difficult they may be. (Here, I’m just trying to gather up my own reserves after seeing a number of qualified minority scholars and women denied tenure in the College over the past couple of years; and deep-seated, unconscious prejudices steering faculty searches.) Thanks for your inspiring example! Keep up the good work!

The system is far from ideal, and we would make progress more quickly if we changed some things. First, someone with power has to recognize the single-minded, brilliant person as having the potential to do great things, and some minimum level of encouragement or support has to be given (e.g. someone has to read their papers and give decent comments, and don’t they need some money to live?). If we are very biased towards imagining a genius as a white male, we are missing many geniuses. And there will be some level of investment that must be made in potential geniuses to get a demonstrated genius, maybe this is only a 10% yield, who knows.

Second, unbalanced single-minded people will be single-minded no matter what the nature of the scientific environment. But scientific progress also requires more mundane day-by-day activities, and complex projects that must be managed over decades before they achieve results. Many people have the aptitude and desire for this work, but are turned off by the scientific culture. And many people were not turned off completely, but are operating at less than their full potential.

And I will just mention in closing that people do not work in a vacuum, and even socially maladjusted geniuses benefit from the scientific and social input of colleagues. So we should not perpetuate “Hmm”’s extremely narrow view of the nature of scientists.

I’m very glad to hear from you. Yes, keep your eyes on your goals and try to simply ignore the discouraging remarks of the Summers-types (and some above in this thread) and go for what you want. In fact, every time somebody doubts your ability, instead use that doubt as ammunition to strive harder to get where you want. That’s what I did, and still do, as someone of colour who was also discouraged by so many of those people and images around me as I went through my career.

Thanks for checking in, and do come back from time to time!

Cheers,

-cvj

I’ve been very lucky so far to have received almost universal encouragement to go into the physical sciences. I have several excellent mentors (male and female) who have provided wonderful support and have directed me towards opportunities to observe at professional-class telescopes and get involved in a meaningful way in astronomical research. My interactions with aspiring astronomers and physicists my own age have been very positive, and have left me feeling very optimistic because they represent the future of science, and from my experience do not hold the same sexist beliefs that often characterize men of older generations. Perhaps this is naive, but I think that because a new generation free of many of the old-fashioned biases is entering the field, the situation of women in academia will improve.

However, I find the actions of influential academics like Summers highly disturbing because their opinions affect impressionable young people like me. When the president of Harvard tells me that I’m fundamentally less capable in the things I love than the boy sitting next to me, it is hard not to feel discouraged. I think that as long as men in positions of power and influence make statements like Summers’, women will be at a disadvantage.

To encourage young girls like myself, I think that women scientists could increase their public exposure by writing more articles in newspapers and magazines, and make more appearances on TV to talk about new and exciting research in all scientific fields.

Thank you Dr Johnson for bringing up such important issues.

~R J-C

My guess would be the biggest barrier unrelated to performance are probably at the high school to undergrad transition, and the next may be at the undergrad to graduate transition.

Strange that, isn’t it?

-cvj

Whether this is done at expense of more qualified male candidates is hard to say…

But ever so easy to assume, right?

-cvj

Examples of more blatant discrimination are very much relevant for this discussion. We are discussing injustices against women scientists, but keep quiet on other injustices. Is it because one group doesn’t care about another discriminated group? Or do we have a popular issue with women in science that everyone (almost everyone) feels more comfortable than, say, asians or jews in science? Because in arguing for a certain female:male ratio that, say, resembles that of our population we are getting dangerously close to Buchanan’s complaints that asian and jewish students dominate ivy league schools and that the student body should resemble that of america.

And if equality in representation at every level is not a measure of lack of discrimination, then what do we use as such measure? I am not sure I have the answer.

I have similar feelings to what Hmm expressed regarding rumor mills statistics of female/male competitiveness. It would appear as if a lot of departments are fighting over the few good female candidates. Whether this is done at expense of more qualified male candidates is hard to say, without some external numerical measure.

I taught 8.022 with him my first semester at MIT. Up late one night grading, he was reminiscing about his early days, and described how terrible he was. He specifically remembered the course evaluation you wrote, which (with reinforcement from senior MIT faculty) played a huge role in waking him up. (And no doubt played a huge role in his apologizing to you.)

The a-holes can change! Might not happen often, but it’s great when it does.

As to your opinion about the irrelevance to science of popular teachers, people who do outreach and people who create welcoming atmospheres…. I’d like to urge you to reconsider. It strikes me as spectacularly short-sighted, and it’s very sad indeed to hear someone saying such a thing. And I’ll leave it at that. Except to say that I do not understand why one model of living and being must always be put in opposition to another. It is sad. Both can exist quite comfortably.

Giving more women and minirities more opportunities to take part in academic life and contribute to science (and society at large in this way) is not a threat to someone else (who may well be from one of those groups!) choosing to lead a “lopsided” (your word) life and contribute to science in their particular way.

How sad and silly.

-cvj

For the good of science it is necessary to make room, indeed greatly encourage, the lopsided people–they make great sacrifices for science, their kind have done and will do infinitely more for science than “well-balanced” people who doodle with inconsequential research, teach popular classes, engage in “outreach”, and are well-liked by all, create welcoming atmospheres etc. etc. These people also have a role, they can inspire others, they can help science be better appreciated by society and so on, but they are ultimately and in a fundamental sense irrelevant for the science itself. It is elitist, undemocratic but true, that signular individuals–very often lopsided in interests, personality, disposition, life choices–have an amazingly large importance in science. Such people have a hard enough time in our society, our first priority should be to foster and nurture them, female or male.

And why is having someone to talk to who can appreciate issues that you might face the same as infantilization? I’m puzzled by that too.

-cvj

I totally agree that, given the historical discrimination against women, that some time needs to be given without such discrimination to really even the playing field. I don’t know how long is enough; probably at least a generation or two is needed. I’m certainly not advocating “stopping” now–indeed this wouldn’t make sense given that I said the “right” ratio could be either 80:20 or 20:80. And I precisely did *not* say that women are taking away jobs that “rightfully” belong to men, indeed this isn’t happening (certainly not systematically any more than the other way around). Instead, I said that given that most physicists are decent people, and given that there clearly has been historical bias against women, that being a women is an additional advantage when being compared to people who are comparably good, which can be an important factor in deciding to hire them. You must see that this is true, again from the hiring pattern in string/particle theory in the last decade. No one is hiring women that aren’t qualified, but very good women are heavily sought after, more so than *comparable* men. But given this situation, it is a little much to go on and on about how evil physicists are, when if anything most are actively helping as much as possible. Of course there are nasty people, but these people harm women, men and others in a variety of different ways. I think perpetuating this culture of victimization of women in physics is a very bad idea–the desperate need for “mentors” and a whole support structure to keep one going is infantilizing and un-necessary. Grad school and post-dochood is just damn tough, as is a research career thereafter. It is also fantastically rewarding, if you’re willing to devote your life to it. The biggest factor impeding the ability to devote ones life to it are the social ones Summers also refered to, and have little to do with practicing scientists. Yes its true that historically men have had an easier time having families and doing science than women, though even this is changing as more people are two-academic career couples. But the solution is definitely not “so, lets change things so you don’t have to obsessively devote your life to science”. Great achievements take great sacrifice, and I think attempts at injecting “balance” into scientific careers is a huge victory for mediocrity over genius. Society should be run in a just way for the average person. But not science–in science we should reward and push obsessive, single-minded, high-risk taking, self-sacrificing, ridiculously brilliant people. Not working to make them more like everyone else. I’m not saying you are suggesting this, only that there is an undercurrent of this sentiment in efforts to make physics more “welcoming”. If anything, physics has too many people now, of insufficiently high quality, and making things more feel-good welcoming is not going to help.

I expanded upon my remarks to Anonymous somewhat in the comment above while you were writing yours, so sorry about that. I think I’ve addressed much of what you say already.

To repeat:- Nobody is advocating giving anybody jobs that they are not qualified to do. Plain and simple. You and others are completely misunderstanding the situation, and trying to paint it as some kind of conspiracy against men. That is ridiculous.

And then you say this:

I also agree with anon that we can’t know a priori that the ratio of men to women should be 50:50, and asserting that this must be the final outcome and anything else proves discrimination is idiotic. This has nothing to do with justice–in science we care about advancing science and serving this cause is the highest ideal; if this is best donw with an 80:20 or 20:80 split so be it.

Who said that the ultimate goal is that 50:50 should be the split? Where is that written down? I’ve never seen that, actually, and I have studied and written a great deal of language on diversity in the workplace. You speak nobly about serving the cause of science… wouldn’t it make more sense, therefore, to give the “experiment” a chance to be done properly? We don’t know what the natural “split” should be, so why not assume equipartition and then see what the dynamics produce? As a scientist, I would have leaned toward doing that instead of starting with 100:0, and then seeing if the numbers change much despite all the obvious effects that favour the status quo: the boundary condition of 100:0 strongly favours preserving itself. Much of what people are discussing (the “squeaking” you refer to) are the conditions in the workplace and career path that preserve the status quo with regards representation. How can one ignore these huge effects as an honest scientist, if you want to put it in those terms?

As I’m sure you’d see this if this were a discussion about an actual scientific effect or system rather than what it is - reactions based on the misguided perception that women are somehow now taking jobs away that somehow rightfully belong to men- it seems to me that you’re putting aside the noble scientist ideals instead of favouring business as usual.

-cvj

Give anon a break, and read what he wrote which is very reasonable. The point is not whether there are very talented women or not, of course there are. Many of them have top faculty positions because they were clearly the best person in the search. But to the extent that there is any actual systematic discrimination, it is in the direction of actively looking to hire women. This is certainly true in string and particle theory; a woman post-doc on the market will end up on lots of shortlists, many more than a comparable male post-doc. If you’re a somewhat above average female post-doc, you’ve got it made, and can almost be guaranteed a faculty position, which is certainly not the case for a somewhat above average male post-doc. For evidence one can look at the job rumr mill and its archives–http://particle.physics.ucdavis.edu/rumor/doku.php–where the short lists and hires going back ten years are documented. Look at who has been hired, and compare their records with other hires using the SPIRES data base http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/hep.
This isn’t to say that women are beating out much more qualified men, but rather that being a woman gives one a significant edge in being hired relative to candidates of comparable strength, and especially at junior faculty level, it isn’t so easy to differentiate between people anyway, so this edge is doubly useful. Again, to any women who may be getting discouraged–most people in physics are very reasonable, they care mostly about physics, and are actively looking to hire qualified women and have huge incentives to make this happen.

I agree with anon that other groups suffer much more blatant and severe forms of discrimination that we don’t talk about nearly as much–the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I also agree with anon that we can’t know a priori that the ratio of men to women should be 50:50, and asserting that this must be the final outcome and anything else proves discrimination is idiotic. This has nothing to do with justice–in science we care about advancing science and serving this cause is the highest ideal; if this is best donw with an 80:20 or 20:80 split so be it.

The real question comes - whether woman should be hired because of her gender, over a male applicant who is deemed more qualified?

Wow. Do you really think that people are still pondering that question? That answer is actually no.

No, that is not the real question:

Nobody is confused about whether you hire someone because of their gender over their abilities. You don’t. You don’t need to, because despite what you believe, there’s an awful lot of highly qualified women out there who can match the ability and qualifications of the men who applied for that same job.

And what you say about asian students is interesting, and sure there is discrimination there, but I don’t see the relevance to this particular discussion. Your argument seems to be to not address or take seriously this problem since there is another problem that you care more about. That’s strange to me.

And you seem to have a very poor grasp of what goes on in hiring decisions, in actual work environments (your description of what you believe is going on in the workplace is naive, and particulalrly sad given what actual women have written on this thread and others), and in the actual talent pool that is there. In particular, I’m not aware of any jobs in science that require women to run marathon, or sit there being tall, so why on earth is it at all relevant to bring up every man’s favourite irrelevant statistics about stuff they can currently do better on average than women? Your remarks about mathematics tests, proportion of women perfoming at the highest levels in these tests, and IQ are on very shaky ground indeed, for hosts of reasons that have been gone through again and again. I question the interpretation of the data for a start, and further, whether the data you quote are data at all given so many factors that are so often left out. Have a look -just as one tiny example- at the huge effects on the results that people find when you vary the context and conditions that these tests are taken under. See the study I referred to in a previous comment, as one example. The fact is that we have no way of knowing if there is anything close to a genetic basis for the underrepresentation that is there, but the more important point is that there are so very very many obvious things (including the simple blindness to the matter that you’ve displayed) that are happening in the workplace to create this underrepresentation that any genetic differences in ability (positive or negative) are probably totally irrelevant right now, and will be for some time. Also, one last thing on genetics - A faculty or other top level job in academia requires a huge range of skills. You don’t sit there all day running the marathon, or being tall, or arm-wrestling, or doing integrals in your head, or being old, or any other things from the simplistic skill set that you and other trot out in these discussions… you do a wide range of things that require a variety of abilities. Are you saying that there’s been testing that shows that women have no aptitude to do that job compared to men? That all their talents used in the combination required to be a successful scientist are sub-par? I’m pretty sure that the experiement has not been done - the test not run. The only such test I can think of would be to actually give women a chance to perform alongside the men in equally favourable conditions in the academic workplace… Then we’ll know for sure.

-cvj

Discrimination (including the one against female scientists) in hiring decisions should be viewed separately from underrepresentation. Most people who comment on these issues seem to treat underrepresentation as clear-cut evidence of discrimination. In other words, discrimination must exist because female/male ration among faculty is still far from 50:50.

I am not sure what goes on in hiring committees, but from what I hear, a lot of faculty are aware of these issues and are under pressure to hire women. The real question comes - whether woman should be hired because of her gender, over a male applicant who is deemed more qualified?

The real problem in my opinion is not the subtle sexism that I will admit still exist in some faculties, even though I should say I have witnessed more not-so-subtle discrimination of many other groups that remain silent and the treatment that media doesn’t like to focus on.

The real (and the biggest) problem is that faculty position is often a terrible job with long hours and full dedication. 20ies are spent getting PhD, and 30ies are typically spent doing post-doc stints and landing tenure. Men can afford to postpone starting their family until 40ies, but not women, for obvious biological reasons. Poll 10,000 high school girls on what they expect their lives to be like in 20-25 years and most will involve getting married and having children.

My wife who is a biologist, would gladly forego an option of having a guaranteed tenured faculty position if the price she has to pay is to remain childless. An option of doing stints in biotech industry (well-paid, 40 hrs/week job) while balancing family and kids seems like a much, much, MUCH more appealing option for her. She says she witnesses no signs of discrimination, but in her lab women are clear majority, with a few scarce men scientists having to listen to girls talking about boys, shaving their legs and other female stuff (I guess we all discriminate if we are majority). She also makes more money then men at the same level, because she does better job.

I am sure sexism in the workplace still exists in many places, but think of other groups that may be discriminated against - not so subtly either. Not many people want to talk about very real problems in discrimination against foreign students, especially asians (I am not an asian student, by the way!). Why? Because they are definitely well represented among student body in sciences and engineering. However, despite excellent analytical abilities and exceptional work ethic, a large fraction of faculty jobs (and grad student/postdoc positions) goes to US scientists. Foreigners, especially chinese/korean/indian students (but to lesser extent western europeans) have often more troubles adapting to new country and new language and viewed as outsiders more so than US-born women. In many cultures it is considered impolite to be assertive, or even ask questions of their superiors. Most asians have troubles communicating their results the way american students would, they cannot rely on social networks that US students build. So despite working much harder than US counterparts, foreign students often end up at dead ends of job search when their visas expire and they are forced to go home. Add on top of that, unpronouncable and hard-to-remember names, hard-to-distinguish faces, and problems of international travel for conferences imposed post-9/11. Asians are also unfairly considered “poor leaders” (not clear why, but there was some research on this) which is why you don’t see as many asian professors as you do asian undergrads or grad students. They are less likely to complain and view their plight as unfortunate circumstances, rather than wide and openly discriminatory policies. I never once heard an asian student talking about lack of mentorship from asian foreign-born professors, or the number of asian professors at the department being a key issue for selecting a school.

It’s very easy to feel that you are discriminated against - all you have to do is blame everything bad that happens to you (and something bad is bound to happen during grad school or postdoc years) on discrimination. Graduate (and undergrad) students are mistreated on regular basis. Are women mistreated more than males? Perhaps. Is it to the point that women get so discouraged that they pursue their careers in other fields? Maybe, but I doubt it. Media likes to focus on these issues, but there is a wider range of problems that force women (and men) to look into alternative careers than academic research, which is not as glamorous as many reporters make it out to be.

As to Summers comments - while what he said was clearly an intended provocation, if you actually read the transcript of his speech, most reasonable people will probably agree with it. If he said it as independent voice, rather than sounding like an official Harvard policy, he might have been treated more even-handedly. Aptitude difference was raised as ONE of many other factors and he definitely didn’t claim it was the KEY factor as media made it out to be.

It’s clear, however, that mere mentioning of aptitude differences raises a lot of PC flags. You can say that men are slightly taller and slightly stronger than women. Male runners are faster than female runners, again, on average. But you cannot even raise a possibility that even the slightest difference exists in the way male and female brains work.

Male marathoners are faster than female marathoners by an average of 10-15 minutes. This doesn’t mean much, considering that range of marathon times ranges from 2 hours to 6+ hours. So any random female marathoner in NYC marathon is only slightly more likely to be beaten by any random male marathoner - say their chances are 49.5% to 50.5%. Not so for the top runners - top male finisher will easily beat the top female finisher.

Similarly, the tallest person is very likely to be a male, and the oldest person living a woman. The tails of distributions have a vastly different proportion than the middle parts.

Boys are doing only slightly better than girls in math tests, a difference that is almost insignificant, given the width of distribution. But girls make for a much smaller portion among Putnam math competitions, math and physics international olympiads, etc. - regardless of nationalities. Boys are also more prone to dominate the low-IQ ends of the spectrum (a statement that is for some reason much less controversial than the high-IQ one). Most mentally deficient children tend to be boys.

Males comprise 99% of prison population, and the chances of being molested by, mugged or serially-killed by a woman is almost zero. There are theories that males are genetically more of an outliers in terms of their reasoning abilities - on both ends of the spectrum.

The best approach I can think of is instituting a blind “first round” in hiring committees, when applications are ranked on their merits without knowing the gender, name, nationality or any other personal information about the applicant. Publications, citations, research/teaching experiences, key CV info, research proposals can be easily evaluated without knowing candidate’s identity. Even recommendation letters can be written by withholding gender/name of the candidate, but it requires more work.

Would such blind policy reveal bias against women and help search committees hire more women candidates? Maybe. Or maybe it will do the opposite and reveal a pressure to hire a female candidate even if it comes at the cost of quality. Either way, I doubt the female/male ratio will aproach 50:50 even if all bias is eliminated - unless committees deliberately hire females over more qualified males. The pool of available female candidates will not be equal to those of male, unless all women decide that it’s acceptable to sacrifice having kids (or postpone it till late 40ies). Or males can be made to carry the baby and take care of it full-time for a few years, and they actually agree to it.

I realize that many women will see this rant as anti-female. So be it. But if you apply the same scientific reasoning that you would to any other problem (approaching it with an outside perspective), you can see that it is not, and any polarization of ideas only hurts the cause.

Since Clifford already mentioned the conference at USC, I’ll follow up to say that we would like to see this type of event in other regions of the country. There are three different groups coming to this year’s conference with the intention of starting similar events in their regions. So keep your eyes open for the next Women in Physics Conference near you. There will be a post-conference report and information about the other groups on our website.

One thing I’ve learned (should I say “I” or “we”) through the process of organizing the conference is that there are a lot of great resources out there and lot of people who care about the issue of the underrepresentation of women are willing to help. Sometimes you just need to ask.

Thanks for the post, Clifford.

-cvj

Cheers,

-cvj